[Patent document 1] JP-2004-252563 A
[Patent document 2] JP-2006-33377 A
Patent documents 1, 2 recite a short range wireless communications technology such as Bluetooth communications (Bluetooth is a registered trademark, and referred to as BT) to perform mail transfer from a cellular phone to an in-vehicle apparatus. For instance, the cellular phone and the in-vehicle apparatus establish a short range wireless communications link with each other; then, the cellular phone receives an electronic mail from a communications network. In such a case, mail information regarding the electronic mail received by the cellular phone is transferred to the in-vehicle apparatus. The mail information includes an arrival time and date, a mail source, a subject name, and a text body.
There is developed a message access profile (MAP) to enable a transfer of mail information from a cellular phone to an in-vehicle apparatus for realizing a mail transfer, which is defined by the communications standard of BT. In contrast, there is widely used a handsfree profile (HFP) to enable a handsfree phone call, which is defined by the communications standard of BT. This is because the handsfree phone call is a main usage of the cellular phone in a vehicle compartment.
From such a situation, a multi-connection (or concurrent connection) of simultaneously making connection of HFP and MAP between a cellular phone and an in-vehicle apparatus has been considered so as to enable a transfer of mail information from the cellular phone to the in-vehicle apparatus with respect to the electronic mail received from the communications network even when the cellular phone is under the handsfree phone call with the in-vehicle apparatus. However, such a configuration to establish concurrent connection of several protocols constantly poses an issue to increase a power consumption in both the cellular phone and in-vehicle apparatus. The issue, in particular, affects the cellular phone, which uses as an operating power an electric power from an internal battery.